The present invention relates to an input mechanism for generating electric pulses which can be converted into coded signals to be fed into an electronic data-processing system. The pulses can also be displayed in the form of alphanumeric characters by an electronic display device having a plurality of display terminals.
In known systems of this type, letters, numbers and other symbols are entered into an electronic data-processing system, and the input can be observed simultaneously by means of an electronic display device, for example, a typewriter keyboard as disclosed in published German application 1,499,170. However, such keyboards usually take up a relatively large amount of space and they are costly to manufacture.